Posting Rates as Expectations

User @KCC posted this excellent question on the Discord server: "How important is abiding by the advertised posting rate for everyone?"

@Keleth responded with: "I always intended for the rate to just be a guideline, a way to set expectations without being strict."

Design intentions aside, how do you feel when a game deviates wildly from the advertised posting rate?

The keyword here is wildly. I will get annoyed if there is a consistent deviate without reason. Sickness, getting drunk in the woods, anything is fine, as long as we have been informed.

+1

When I create a game I leave it at the default and let the game find its own rate. Apologies to anyone who’s been misled by my ads.

In theory I start to follow up with players after things have stalled for more than the expected length of time.

I generally use this as a guideline for for when to tell players that they should wait for input from a slow player.

I usually read posting rates in games as one of two things: Either "around daily" or "around weekly". I'm not interested in the second group. Also, if I don't reply right away, I forget replying, so I usually open all red threads immediately and then try to work my way through and only then close the tab. So regardless of posting rate, I will always just reply "when I can"

It's a social contract. People need to put in an effort to meet the agreed-upon rate. They might fall behind but that's fine as long as all members of the group are making an effort. If you're going to be unavailable, you can give notice. If someyhing unexpected comes up you can apologize when you return. If somebody is legit struggling then renegotiate. Even if you're ready but it's not your turn, you can still post in OOC. You can often tell when someone is trying and when someone is not.

It's just manners, plain and simple.

Echoing my own Discordian contribution, to which Jabes had likely alluded:

There is a PBP force at hand.

Consider: Five participants, five posts per week. Everyone can be ready for your one post per day, but when you're ready, maybe you are not up in the order, or you're still waiting for a response. So because of relative timing of availability, even if everyone can post once per day, they're not always available to make that post as soon as they are up, so the asynchonous nature of the beast means that it quickly spread's out into a longer waits.

I also feel like before COVID it was different. I'm not sure, but it seems like we were less aware of things happening to people and so there was less impetus to allow deviation. Nowdays, it seems like something is happening to someone every week, and it's hard to enforce a rate when you know you could be the one it happens to next.

Personally, I try to post whenever I can - even if it's ahead of rate - because I'm on call for work pretty much 24/7. Some weeks I get nothing, other weeks I have no free time at all.

Copied from my Discord post:

I’ll skip applying to games where the rate is either too slow/fast for what I’m looking for. In games that I’m running I expect the players to at least make an effort to keep up with the advertised rate, but realize things happen, and that’s fine - no issue at all there.

One of my frustrations right now is that most of the games I’m playing in are well under the advertised rate. Not an issue when one or two get that way, but when they all hit a lull at the same time I tend to apply to more games and then BAM, all the slow games pick back up and I struggle to keep up. 😀

Exactly this.

I guess I'm less concerned with the actual rate as I am with the attitude towards it. For me, absolutely yes, it is an expectation just like everything else stated on the game details page. Can/should it be enforced? No, maybe not. Things happen. And it's not a dictatorship. But common courtesy demands everyone put in best effort. I may have RL things going on but so does everyone else. I have too much respect for everyone else's time to just shrug at the agreed-upon posting rate.

I know I've been an offender in this regard, but why not give my two cents from the perspective of when I've been my best self.

I almost always make my games 5 times a week. I feel like daily is unrealistic (particularly weekends) and anything less than daily-ish has always fallen apart.

I'm less concerned with the rate of posting as the rate of checking in. Echoing Qralloq: Sometimes nothing's happening with your character and it's okay to not post, but stay vigilant. I know I try to bring the spotlight back around to other players when they haven't had a chance to participate for a bit.

That being said it's a delicate balance because, if they haven't been posting, I may assume they are starting to disappear and i don't want to stall a scene by having an npc engage with an inactive player.

Unfortunately we can't really track "checking in" so perhaps a an ooc post would be the best way to do that. I suppose now it's easier to ping people on discord if they haven't posted, but I assume we're not requiring that.

I'm with Adam on this one. It'll take a while, but as players settle in, they then begin to understand what everyone's degree of commitment ends up being. (This doesn't include players who begin to ghost and eventually bow out for whatever reason.)

I usually treat the expectation stated in the initial game ad as aspirational, and have played in successful games which have both exceeded as well as fallen short of that expectation.

I think it's all about the social contract part of it for me.

I may want, and hope, and ask, that we shoot for 5 posts a week (particularly at the beginning of a game, when you're trying to establish it), but I also recognize that such a pace is rarely (never?) achievable consistently, indefinitely, for everyone.

Games ebb and flow.

What's important to me is that you're putting in the same amount of effort as the other players.

I tend to also let games find their own pace, but I've found in recent years it's difficult to keep most games going if they are not daily or near-daily check-ins. I run some notably different games elsewhere, and those sometimes go days, weeks, even months between posts. One game I run has been napping since 2018, and I'm about to rekindle it. That's with a select group of people, however, whom I've played with for a long time, and it's absolutely the exception rather than the rule.

The "PbP Force" that Qralloq mentions above -- very real, in my experience, and also why slower / in-order initiative systems and in-the-moment character-specific checks that halt the narrative until they are resolved can be so rough on a game. It's why I dig platforms that support @mentions.

Perhaps most problematic of all, I've found it challenging over the years to manage games where the players have wildly differing post rates. I've tried to cross this particular snake pit a few different ways, but I don't know if I've ever found an elegant and really effective solution.

I agree with many of the sentiments expressed so far, including the social contract idea, and the ebb-and-flow idea. However, I do get pretty paranoid when the posting rate falls below that advertised at the beginning of a game. If a player is falling quiet for more than three "cycles" (so, three non-weekend days in a 5-post-per-week game, say), I'll PM them. (I don't have time to do Discord, sorry.) I also encourage my players to post even when it's not their "turn," just to keep the threads fresh and to indicate that they're still paying attention and invested. Serious, I would prefer a player post, "Jackogia shuffles his feet in anticipation" than to not post for several days while other PCs take turns or whatever.

So, Tl;dr: Lack of posting kills games, so I get paranoid about it and try to mitigate it, albeit not always successfully.

Ah yes, forgot to chime in on that -- WarDomo mentioned pinging people on Discord, and I find that works really well... if everyone is on Discord. Since I started backing virtually every PbP game I run with a dedicated Discord channel, this technique has really helped keep pace in the games. Mostly. ;)

It definitely helps and the banter often adds even more fun to the game.

It’s a tricky thing. In the past, I’ve tried to be loose about posting rate and let games "find their own flow". After all, the last thing I want to be doing is chasing people down to make a post. It’s supposed to be fun, not a chore.

Frequent posting, however, helps to maintain momentum. The problem that I’ve repeatedly encountered over the years is that PbP games can quickly grind to a halt if posting becomes too infrequent or inconsistent. And once a game begins to lose momentum, it can be damn near impossible to get it back. So for that reason, I tend to treat the posting rate expectation as a solid requirement rather than a guideline. Not for the sake of courtesy, per se, but because I know the game’s success is potentially at stake (don’t mean to sound dramatic, lol).

That said, I echo what WarDomo and Jabes have mentioned. For me, the attitude toward posting and taking the time to check in is what matters most. As long as a player actively communicates with me, I’m fine with someone not always meeting the posting minimum. Hell, I’ve been very guilty of this myself.

This is why I also tend to like having a decently sized group of players, usually 4-7. More players means more regular posting, which serves to keep up the momentum. For me, having less than four players is a risky proposition, as posting will likely get too slow. That’s just been my experience. The ideal number for me is between 5 and 7; that ensures that the player count doesn’t fall too low if someone ghosts or has to unexpectedly drop the game.